Inflation

Prices going up is what you see. Money going down is what is happening.

Inflation occurs when the quantity of money grows faster than the quantity of things to buy with it. The mechanism is the same whether the new money arrives as silver from a mountain in the Andes, as a Roman coin quietly stripped of its silver content, or as a deposit written into an account when a bank approves a loan.

It cannot be measured directly, because money is the ruler that is shrinking. So statistical agencies price a basket instead: a representative set of goods and services, checked repeatedly. In the United States roughly eighty thousand prices are collected every month and weighted by what households actually spend.

That published number is an average, so your personal inflation rate is almost certainly different from it. Most central banks deliberately target 2% a year rather than zero.